Coffee Shops

While visitors to Richard Charlton's Coffeehouse, the first major reconstruction on Colonial Williamsburg's Main Street in nearly half a century, will be treated to 3-ounce servings of coffee, tea or hot chocolate, spokesman Jim Bradley says it's unlikely the restaurant's first patrons would have been satisfied with such dainty samples.

"Outside one of the rooms, which was probably a private dining room, we found just piles and piles and piles of broken wine bottles," says Bradley.

As it turns out, taverns weren't the only places where sociable Colonists could enjoy stiff drinks and politically charged conversations. Contrary to standard American histories, taverns functioned more like highway rest stops, complete with government-controlled prices, lackluster food and a sketchy clientele. Locals typically preferred to do their drinking in coffeehouses, which were all the rage in England when King George III was in charge.

Erin Meister trains baristas for North Carolina-based Counter Culture Coffee and sporadically maintains the blog Meet the Press Pot from her home in New York City. This is part of a series of tips for the caffeine-addicted.

Well, what do you know? Clovers really are lucky.

Of course, I'm not talking about the four-leaf kind, though that type's pretty rare, too. No, I mean the Clover coffee maker, a high-tech gadget that dropped jaws all over bean circles a few years ago, with its deeply sophisticated, digital one-cup-at-a-time brewing (not to mention the $11K price tag).

At first, the machines were the pride of the serious coffee lover, with independent cafés snapping them up as a way of showcasing artisanal coffees one by one, instead of losing them to the murky depths of an insulated thermos. But when Starbucks bought the Clover technology last year, the funky-looking little metal boxes were suddenly less and less available to your average café owner, becoming proprietary to the green mermaid.

So why is this lucky? Because it started a revolution. Or, more accurately, a renaissance. Read more about getting lucky with cup-at-a-time coffee after the jump.

Alex Clark and Aaron Hagegorn of New York's Ost Café. Photo: Erin Meister

Erin Meister trains baristas for North Carolina-based Counter Culture Coffee and sporadically maintains the blog Meet the Press Pot from her home in New York City. This is part of a series of tips for the caffeine-addicted.

Sometimes it seems like owning a coffee shop is on everybody's bucket list: Travel around the world, write the great American novel, retire and open a top-notch café. Last year, Alex Clark, 26, and Aaron Hagedorn, 33, checked that last one off, abandoning their steady (if somewhat boring) financial-sector 9-to-5s in midtown Manhattan for predawn mornings and late, overcaffeinated nights helming Ost Café in Gotham's Alphabet City neighborhood.

The friends traded in their office desks for Ost's beautiful corner location in an ever up-and-coming part of town -- complete with floor-to-ceiling windows and plenty of sunlight -- in order to live the proverbial dream as small-business owners... but do they think it was worth it? Leave it to the CoffeeMeister to find out.

Barista Amber Sather Photo: Erin Meister

Erin Meister trains baristas for North Carolina-based Counter Culture Coffee and sporadically maintains the blog Meet the Press Pot from her home in New York City. Check out her series of tips for the caffeine-addicted.

Everybody thinks their neighborhood barista is the best. The difference is that New York-based espresso doyenne Amber Sather really is one of the best, as her Barista Championship titles attest (Sather's taken home first place in two Northeast regional barista competitions and third in the national event, among others).

Though many folks don't know they exist, barista championships are no joke to coffee professionals: You must prepare four espressos, cappuccinos and signature drinks of your own design to a panel of judges under extreme pressure.

The sassy Montana native moved to New York City a year ago, leaving a barista-trainer position with Intelligentsia Coffee and Tea in Chicago for a spot on the team at Brooklyn favorite Café Grumpy, where she trains baristas and passes cup after caffeinated cup to sleepy locals.

After the jump, Sather chats with the CoffeeMeister about barista competitions, her idea of the perfect café and more.

A well-made cappuccino. Photo: Erin Meister

Erin Meister trains baristas for North Carolina-based Counter Culture Coffee and sporadically maintains the blog Meet the Press Pot from her home in New York City. This is the tenth in a series of tips for the caffeine-addicted.

Like Brooklynites arguing over the perfect egg cream, baristas do sometimes spar about the perfect cappuccino: What's the precise coffee-to-milk ratio? Should it be "bone dry" with stiff foam that peaks like fresh meringue? How is it different from a latte? What makes it so special, anyway?

Like many other things about coffee, the cappuccino even has a charming (and much debated) origin story that adds to its mystique: It's said the drink was named for the monks of Capuchin, whose thick hooded cowls are reminiscent of the creamy caffeinated treat. Maybe that's why some people treat a great cappuccino as a religious experience?

More about the proverbial "perfect cappuccino" after the jump.